Ever met someone you later learned had done something really bad? **Content warning: thread contains mentions of child abuse**

[user2848502016]

Just asking because a few months ago someone I worked with suddenly stopped coming to work... then we found out he had been found guilty of possessing child porn 😬
He hadn't been working with us for long so didn't know him that well but he just seemed like a nice, slightly boring middle aged man! I know you can't ever tell by looking at someone but it just made me think anyone I know could be doing anything behind closed doors.....

Thread titled edited by MNHQ to add a content warning

A couple actually. A good school friend, so lovely and mild mannered, later raped a number of students he was teaching at a college.
then, A good Uni friend, funny life and soul type, loved by all, went on to steal a significant amount of money from a company he worked at, and skipped the country.

you never know ….

My neighbours boyfriend.
Acted like he was boyfriend of the year. Turned out he'd almost killed his ex girlfriend and had spent 6 years in prison. It had been in all the newspapers.
Wasn't his fault though 🙄🙄🙄 she 'provoked' him 😡

My partners old boss is now in prison for a high profile murder, we thought it was someone of the same name until he was on the front of the paper.

A friend had a job that involved young people. We hadn't had contact for a while for various reasons, but I knew they were looking for a new career as it wasn't working out.

The next I heard of them was when i confronted with a media report that I stumbled over about how they were inappropriately involved with one of their charges.

Massive shock.

Yes, a mum at school. I don't really talk to anyone in the playground - I don't really fit in with the cliques. At a school event a couple of years ago another outlier like me 😂struck up a conversation and from then on we would chat in the playground. It was nice!

We went for a coffee a couple of times and she seemed so sweet - quiet and gentle. She set up her own business as a hairdresser and invited me to the opening, I lost the flier so googled her name (also name of the salon, not a common name) and it came up in the local newspaper that she had been in prison for defrauding elderly people.

I was completely shocked. It is definitely her as it had her photo. Her child was born in prison. I have never mentioned it to her or anyone else and don't see her so much anymore but we remain friendly - I just cannot believe this sweet, quietly spoken lady could do such a thing? I really feel there must be more to it, her partner seems quite dodgy (but I only met him after I found out) so maybe he coerced her? I really couldn't ask her about it though.

Why wouldn't you change your name? I would have to leave the area too - she literally has to walk down a road where one of her victims lived to get to school.

OMG, was she one of the victims in the end???

We found out that a co worker that had worked with us 15 years ago had been recently arrested for sexually abusing a child with another man. She was 5 at the time, from the dates we worked out that he'd done this just a couple of years before he worked with us. He was sentenced to around 20 years I think about 2 years ago.

A few...

Had a very brief fling with a guy that was later jailed (and it was in the press) about abusing his kids. I felt sick when I saw it in the paper.

A long term friend of my ex. My ex told me that his friend got drunk one night and showed him stuff on his PC... loads of child porn. He even had a system organising it into folder by age. When more people were getting caught, and was being publicised... he removed the hard drives from his PC, drove the opposite end off the country and dumped then in random bins.

I met a lady in a MH group. Later found out that her DH had been on trial for abusing kids, along with a small group of other men. He was the only one that was not sent to prison. There was articles about it, and all the comments were from people saying that he had abused their sons, and that he had got away with it.

Friend of a friend, nice chap in his 50s, taught music at a school. Got sent down for grooming sixth formers into having sex with him on school trips.

Given that he killed prostitutes, its highly unlikely.

A lad in the year above me at school got on the same bus as me and my younger sister, used to meet us in the morning and walk us home after school, he seemed nice and funny and we got on well. He had a younger sister who also got on the same bus but she was quiet and we didn’t talk to her much.
A few years after leaving school, his face was everywhere. Turned out he’d been sexually abusing his sister since she was young. He went to prison, not sure if he’s out now. Still makes me feel sick to my stomach.

Fucking hell. The volume of child abusers on here.

I used to go to a regular folk session in a local pub. The lead fiddle player - an astonishingly talented young man - lived with one of the guitar players and his husband: beautiful, generous, kind, and wonderful people.

We had a group gig on St Patrick's Day. Turned the radio on in the morning and heard a manhunt was underway following a local murder and attempted murder.

In the afternoon the news arrived that the lovely guitar player had been killed and his husband was fighting for his life in hospital. The fiddle-playing lodger had attacked them in the early hours.

We went ahead with the gig in memory of our friend and in solidarity with his husband. The husband survived, but the trauma and loss of his decades-long love was so very hard for him to bear, I do not know how he found the strength to endure but endure he did.

The fiddle player was apprehended and while I don't remember his sentence it was substantial. Mitigating factor was his mental health.

It was a very weird, upsetting, and unsettling time. The folk group never really recovered and we drifted away.

Yes I worked with a guy when we were both in our 20's, really friendly and funny. Turned out he'd killed his sister when they were both teenagers. He even tried to stage it as a break-in gone wrong because they were home alone when it happened. It wasn't pre-meditated but I just couldn't look at him or converse with him the same after I found out.

A colleague who'd I'd worked with for many years and always got on well with, regularly chatted to etc. All of a sudden he disappeared from work and everyone thought he'd had a heart attack as was off long term sick but it turns out he'd been arrested after the police raided his home as part of a massive country wide paedophile sting operation.

I used to sit and watch Crimewatch every month with DH and say wouldn't it be funny if someone we knew appeared on there...
Fast forward a few years and a guy we knew who lived at the bottom of our road and drank with us in the pub was on CW involved in a shoot out abroad and wanted in this country... We knew he was a bit of a wide boy but were 😲!!

Went to school with this guy, someone who was a laugh but also quiet and reserved but someone you would expect to do well in life and seemed like a good soul, fast forward a few years he was on a uni day out to the safari park with fellow students he studied with, he got a girl in the group in a head lock and stabbed her in the neck, he got two years for attempted murder!! 😳

Fitness instructor went to prison for child rape.

Women. He killed women.

NC for this. Never been proven but I think it’s possible he was involved.
Local TV reported a cold case review of the unsolved murder of a teenage girl 20 years earlier. I’d lived in a totally different part of the country then and went out with a bloke for about 8 months. His behaviour was often off, I left his car and he ran after me, threw me over his shoulder and got me back in the car in seconds. I dumped him, later found he’d lied about so many things.
He had disappeared for a week , suddenly reappeared and said he’d had to go to X town but was vague about why or what he’d done when usually very full of himself.
He’s been in the town where this girl was murdered the weekend she was murdered. And it was thought she’d been abducted very quickly into a vehicle that wasn’t his but matched the description of one he had access to at work. Left all the information with the police.

I only recently discovered that my neighbour was an ex social worker and was done for fraud. She stole money from social services and preyed on families whose kids were in care. She's always seemed pretty nice when ever I've spoken to her so I was pretty shocked.

My parents were friends with a couple, went to their wedding, my father was at Oxford with the husband etc. The couple divorced and the wife was sadly murdered. The police came round one summer afternoon in the late 70s to ask my parents where they were at the time as they were in the woman’s address books.

This year my mother opened the newspaper to find that the husband has just been found guilty of his ex wife’s murder 45 years later. He’d got away with it all that time. Thankfully my parents had fallen of touch with him after the divorce.

It turns out he was abusive as you can imagine and her sister has fought for all that time for justice for her.

DD’s grandfather in law worked for a company in Yorkshire at the time of the Yorkshire Ripper.
A woman in the office was very nervous about going home in the dark and gfil said don’t worry Peter will get you home safely in the van, now you see her to the door Peter.
Yes.
It was Peter Sutcliffe

This is a total urban myth type story

Worked with a women who was a bit dim but seemed pretty harmless, eventually got moved teams after showing up to work drunk.

A couple of years later a news article made its way around the office of her previous conviction for arson. She set her neighbours house on fire which killed her dogs.

All this predated working with us. How that one got past HR I'll never know. But I would never have guessed she was capable.

I’m very concerned that on a parenting site more people haven’t called out the use of the porn word to describe child abuse images.

It’s telling that more posters ignored it in favour of gossiping about their own ‘bad’ experience.

Disappointing and alarming.